Unscrambling the scramble: Africa's partition reconsidered

Abstract:

Studies of the Scramble for Africa agree on very little beyond the
fact that the topic is immensely broad and extremely complex. For all that
the last decades of the 19th century have been the most closely examined
period of Africa's past, there is agreement neither about what is meant
by imperialism generally, nor about the causes of Africa's partition
specifically. 'The growth of knowledge', Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins have
commented, 'has brought less, and not more, coherence to historical
understanding'. Indeed, the apparently intractable nature of the process
of Partition is underscored in numerous warnings to the unwary to stay clear.
Some ten years ago, Bernard Porter darkly observed that the whole question
was 'bedevilled with misunderstandings and confusions and crosspurposes'.
‘An always somewhat treacherous field’, he wrote, has been ‘churned into
a quagmire’. Nor are more recent conclusions any more sangine. Although
'specific points of agreement will undoubtedly appear - such as the
inapplicability of the Hobsonian model, or the economic bases for annexation
in West Africa', it is unrealistic, according to James Sturgis, 'to expect that
any overall consensus regarding the new imperialism will ever prove
acceptable'. Yet however sensible and timely such warnings, they do little to assuage
an equally widespread feeling that the retreat from generalisation has turned
into a rout. To take only a few examples, Andrew Porter for one has remarked
that the ‘gathering of more knowledge from particular and local studies
often does comparatively little to advance general understanding’, while
Barrie Ratcliffe for another, has pointed to the growing danger that 'area
and case studies will replace ... analysis of the Partition as a whole, and
that concern with complexity will win out over the need to explain. It cannot suffice to claim that the Partition was but the consequence of the convergence
of many different chains of events'. 'It is surely not unreasonable1, Robin
Law has argued, 'to expect that the enormous volume of scholarly work
on the historical problem of European imperialism which has appeared during
the last two decades, should have led to the refinement of theoretical models
as well as to the accumulation of detailed facts, to greater understanding
rather than to despair at the complexity and difficulty of it all'. While readily acknowledging the impossibility of reaching any consensus
which would satisfy even the majority of scholars in such a bitterly contested
field, this paper nonetheless attempts to meet the 'reasonable expectations'
of at least some of them. It does so by immediately distinguishing between
the territorial expansion of empire ('colonialism'), and imperialism (the
monopoly stage of capitalism), after which it proceeds, very briefly, to
outline the main historiographical developments in the study of Africa's
Partition over the last 30 years or so, before suggesting, at greater length,
how an alternative explanation might be constructed.